No Mercy, No Malice — Inside Amazon’s Tech Culture
The tech culture within Amazon is something to awe and emulate in many ways.
Amazon’s Day 1 culture is much talked about and has been researched to much great lengths.
The fast paced, demanding, & challenging working conditions at Amazon which operates like a “startup of startups” , even after the company is close to $2 Trillion in valuation since it began as a small startup 25+yrs ago — is an enigma to most.
Amazon’s work culture is also target of criticism and intense debate partly because Jeff Bezos has gone above and beyond in publicly cherishing the “Leadership Principles” as one of key pillars of maintaining Amazon’s “Day 1” culture that was / is / will help propel it to new heights year over year. Very few companies had boasted their own leadership principles and made it public before Amazon did almost two decades ago.
Some of the observations made by media outlets such as — a scathing piece in the New York Times back in 2015, “Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” by Times or the article by Forbes or the other article of “caustic work culture at Amazon” — are partly correct.
The most interesting quote I came across was from The Verge where it said
Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.
The Flip Side:
It is important to note that Amazon is a LARGE company. I mean its really a huge company of more than million people working! I am not making it up. About 1.3 Million employee work in Amazon worldwide and 950,000+ work in US alone — that is almost 1 in every 150 Americans work at Amazon!
So you can imagine it cannot be all homogenous throughout the company!
There are a wide variety of teams, departments and job roles within Amazon and every department’s work nature, day-to-day activities, culture is going to differ, quite a bit.
In spite of employing such a large workforce across a wide ranging job roles — from hi-tech Engineering, Software, Machine Learning (Alexa), Devices (Kindle), Cloud Tech (AWS), Same Day Delivery (Prime), Sales & Marketing, Vendor management and Futuristic Warehouses — Amazon has been rated as worlds #2 best place to work for 2021 and has been consistently among the top ten best place to work for more than a decade now! Amazon is also among the top ten companies with most number of patents . In the last decade, Amazon’s revenue has grown 10X from $40B to almost $400B
If these are not substantial enough data points, it will be interesting to note that Amazon is perhaps the only handful of mega-cap companies that has its foot in almost every major industry vertical there is to it! Amazon is Competes with a huge list of competitors in almost every major industry vertical!
Amazon has grown way, way beyond its timid start as “Worlds Largest Bookstore” to spreading its wings in at least 50+ industry verticals. Some of the notable business verticals , beyond the traditional ecommerce, include AWS, Audible, Alexa, Kindle, Amazon Fresh / Pantry, Amazon Pay, Prime Videos, Amazon Go or “Just Walk Out” Stores and lot more!
It is clear that Amazon has been firing on cylinders, riding out with guns blazing in more than one verticals and growing like startup for more than two decades now. How is this possible? It cannot be all attributed to happenstance. There has to be some logical explanation to all of this!
Perhaps Jeff Bezos was right in placing relentless focus on building out the correct — Day One — working culture at Amazon through its adept usage of its leadership principles
The Inside Story:
As a former employee of Amazon, who has worked 14+yrs, joined as Software Development Engineer (SDE) turned into Sr. Manager of Software Development (SDM) over the years, I can attest that Amazon’s Tech Work Culture has played a significant, tangible and conspicuous part in shaping the company’s growth trajectory and serving as indispensable competitive advantage.
As mentioned earlier Amazon is a vast company with employees across diverse industry verticals and job roles. As as Software Developer who grew to be Sr. Manager of Software, my purview is limited to the core tech team ‘s culture and don’t claim to know or extrapolate my views on to other departments within Amazon. This inside story is largely within core software / tech departments at Amazon.
I can attest that Amazon’s tech team doesn’t really believe that — having a warm, pleasant, and comfortable work experience — as the primary motivation of the systems in place. The primary motivations of the systems in place are essentially— to deliver high quality products to the customer (Customer Obsession). Everything else is derived “working backwards” on the basis of this first principle. Employees are highly expected and encouraged to seek inspiration, peace & joy from the work output rather than by any other ancillary means.
It is almost like Amazon wants all its tech team to be “Karma Yogi” as described in Bhagavad Gita :-) !!
Of course part of it is true, but part of is beyond acceptable in the 21st century. Amazon knows this. So Amazon pays handsomely to its tech employees. Amazon is pay master, with average salary for tech employee among the most competitive in the industry. Just like Paypal mafia there is also Amazon mafia of Ex-Amazon employees who have gone to start amazing companies
So what is that makes Amazon tech culture and tech ecosystem click?
For this I am going to shamelessly copy Prof Galloways blog roll title — No Mercy, No Malice — to explain the intricacies of Amazon Tech Culture — as I believe that fits the thesis just perfectly.
No Mercy:
Amazon has been cut throat in the way it deals with decision making and project / product roadmap. There is no room for fluff or froth. This is evident in almost all facets of everyday work at Amazon.
Some of the most popular aspect is Amazon’s strict and crisp writing style. The below image with tips on “How to write in Amazon Style” is actually true! I am not kidding! The very first time I wrote a six-pager, I had to “scratch my head” a few times for every word that I need to add or delete. The first 6 pager I wrote must have gone 50+ revisions with my manager before I was even allowed to present to the Director. At the end, I was proud of my work. I was proud of the clarity of data points in the doc that put forth a sound, valid case. I was “Amazonified”!
Amazon has always been known to take bold risks. This has proved quite a trump card for Amazon partly because the definition of failure & success of the new initiative is defined at the start of the project itself. One cannot propose a new initiative without defining its success criteria and measurement duration and a roll back plan if it fails. This process, as detailed in Beauty of 6-Pager blog, is a key system in place to make sure the risks are indeed calculated and well thought out. The success criteria must be a series of data points. The methodology to get the data points is also documented ahead of kickstarting the project.
“Speak now, or forever hold your peace”
Essentially once the 6-pager, after its multiple revisions, is approved & accepted by the quorum, everybody needs to be aligned, put their difference behind, and rally up to make the new initiative a success. Decisions are not taken hastily. Decisions are taken with elaborate data points in consideration. Once decision is taken, everybody rally up behind it and give their best effort to make it as success. Its like an army unit!
These are experiments and experiments do fail and do go south. And when it does go south, it is fine to shut it down, but not before substantiating it with data points!
If I remember correctly, it was the 6-pager about Amazon Scout or for Amazon Spark, the product launch that was supposed to compete with Pinterest. The team had a done an excellent job in noting in very detail the pros and cons of launching Amazon Scout. It was launched with much fan fare in 2017, but had to be shut down later on in 2019 / 2020. The fallout document, the retrospect document, was even more interesting on why the product was taken down. Amazon.com/scout now points to the Scout Robot that was launched recently to deliver packages
There has been many such projects that have been axed mercilessly as it did not go as planned. It doesn’t matter whose or how big the initiatives were, if it did not add-up, Amazon had no mercy to “call a spade as spade”
Amazon shutdown Web Store product after years of trying to get this correct and ultimately yielding. There is an even biggest list of large projects shutdown by Amazon here
Even Jeff Bezos own pet projects have seen the merciless fate of being taken down if “it didn’t add up”. One of Jeff’s infamous pet project, the Fire Phone, was dubbed as fiasco, debacle and complete flop show. It was a failure. It was taken down. However, a side gig of the same Fire Phone project / team gave birth to none other than Alexa & Echo Speaker! Alexa is probably a multi-billion dollar business by itself (disclaimer: I don’t know the numbers)
It is these bold bets and merciless data driven decision making culture that had made it an Innovation Powerhouse and that which is powering Amazon to continuously push the boundaries for the past 25+yrs!
No Malice:
If you think about it, just being merciless can be bad.. quite bad for the company. Its almost like a the perfect place for toxic work culture, high handedness and serving to boss’s whims and fancies can be rampant. The reality is almost quite the opposite.
The Correction of Errors (COE) meetings is a case in point. As usual the COE meetings require a formal COE document to be prepared before and presented at the meeting for initial reading. While it document the sequence of events by timeline, everyone is encouraged to call out the mistakes each person may have done that caused the high-impact issue. I have witnessed my fellow developer calling out, in front of the group of 10 people who were in the COE meeting, that she was the one who brought the entire Amazon.com website down on a busy Monday morning 10am for about 2hrs as she had accidentally deleted the Load Balancer configuration of a couple of critical applications! She said “I did not know I was deleting a production settings. I thought I was deleting my test environment”!
In many companies, this could have gone down quite badly for the employee. At Amazon, the Sr. Manager at the meeting turned to the Load Balancer team manager and asked — “why was it easy for her to delete a prod environment?” . This “why” was one of the “5-Why’s” in the COE document. As you can see a methodical reasoning, without no prejudice and no malice, lead to a corrective action item of “Fixing the application to make it hard to delete / edit production settings”. My colleague may have caused the half-million dollar dip in sales for those 2 hours, but she was not pinned to a corner for the mistake. She is now a Sr. Manager at Amazon and I am sure she has contributed by many X times in terms of value add!
Annual performance evaluation is another case in point. In tech teams it is super hard to put an employee on a Performance Improvement Plan (PIP), contrary to popular rumors. It is also super hard to promote anyone without ample substantiating proof of “consistently operating at the next level” to get promoted to next level.
I was part of the seller success or sales org once and we were part of small, strategic initiatives tech team, with the sales org. As manager I attended the annual performance review meeting and one of the managers had presented a 10 page “Promotions Document” with elaborate details in making a case for promoting one of the merchandising manager to the next level. The document seemed pretty strong case for the promotion as the employee had delivered over and beyond her targets and goals. She was looked up as an owner, go to person, on a variety of projects that were currently in progress. I had worked with her and was in favor of her promotion in the review panel.
As usual the meeting started with silent minutes of reading followed questions and sharing of opinions about the employee. Few had only positive feedback on her, some had both plus & minus points on her, a few only had “areas of improvement” as comments on her performance. This included the director of the org, who was went ahead to quote an instance where she (the director) had seen her (the employee) showing the stern shoulder or cold shoulder to get somethings done for her (the employee’s) project that she was leading and wanted to get done soon. The discussion was going on for a healthy 15–20min and I began to think that perhaps her case was not going to go through. After all these discussion and feedbacks, when the time came to take the vote for her promotions case, it was an overwhelming yes. The director included had voted to promote her! Her deliverables, her customer obsession and ownership in driving key projects swayed the vote in her favor, despite all the critical feedback that were being discussed in the room during the promo review.
When I had privately confided later on with the director that I almost felt the promo case would not go through, she quite simply said — “No one is perfect. Who doesn’t have area of improvement?. We just wanted to make sure she gets constructive feedback so that she can be successful in the next level. Her deliverables speaks for itself”. That was a hat-tip moment for me to her (the director) and the strong underbelly of cultural ethos (No Malice) at play in Amazon!
No Mercy and No Malice — The Yin / Yang Combo:
Being merciless alone will not work. It is “dead on arrival” in fostering a healthy work environment. “No Malice” by itself can be a “pleasant, cushy” place to work, but it will not deliver hyper growth results in the ever competitive tech landscape of the 21st century.
Now the combination of both — No Mercy + No Malice — is a subtle and powerful mix of value system that make it aptly suited, almost ideal, for a hyper growth & hyper innovative work dynamics.
This is not by happenstance.
This was not an unplanned eventuality.
In order to get here of it had to be deliberate.
It was in fact a conscious, strategic and meticulously planned facet of everyday work life at Amazon that has, for all practical purposes, “infused in to everyone’s blood” over the course of their tenure (figuratively!).
From the hiring interviews, to the project discussions, to the performance evaluations, everything is stacked up against the leadership principles as the yard-stick / barometer of evaluation criteria. The leadership principles are part and parcel of everyone’s lingo at Amazon. This can sometimes seem dogmatic, but it is absolutely transparent and enables subconscious alignment in the mental / working model.
I strongly believe this Yin Yang combination of No Mercy and No Malice has worked wonders for nurturing Amazon’s work culture , which has proved to be distinctive & indispensable competitive advantage for the past two decades!
The Challenge Going Forward
As mentioned earlier, one of Amazon’s core strengths has been its over emphasis on its culture and technology powerhouse to keep firing on all cylinders. As Amazon grows to be this large behemoth of tech employees, it is going to be challenge on how Amazon can ensure the same culture and aggressive futuristic visions across all the tech teams across the company. I personally have worked in Amazon Seattle and Amazon India (Chennai) and I can vouch that the culture at Amazon Chennai dev center is vastly different than that of Amazon Seattle. The evaluation bars are much.. much different. However, for various other monetary & logistics reasons , net-net it might work out to have dev centers across the globe in many countries, but it is important that more processes and systems are put in place to ensure that the each of the techie joining Amazon in other parts of world are also “raising the bar” of the “whole of Amazon”!
